I, the People: How Marvin Zindler Busted the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

Behind the scenes of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas lies an authentic true crime history yarn just as entertaining and as much a part of the Lone Star State’s many fabled legends. In I, the People, veteran Houston journalist Gary Taylor recreates the real story behind the closing of the Chicken Ranch and explains the forces that unleashed TV icon Marvin Zindler upon the national scene. More

“The Chicken Ranch was the one, great festering, frustrating sore on the face of law enforcement in Texas.”

The year was 1973. The State of Texas had just elected a new reform-minded governor and attorney general. And Houston’s ABC-TV affiliate station at Channel 13 had just launched a new consumer-oriented investigative feature by hiring flamboyant former lawman Marvin Zindler to seize the spotlight. The roads from those disparate events crossed quickly in dramatic fashion to national acclaim in the Texas Hill Country village of La Grange which had harbored the country’s longest continually operating bordello—a little place known as the Chicken Ranch and beloved to generations of Texas school boys.

When Zindler’s sensational TV expose forced the Chicken Ranch to close, it triggered a national controversy that raged for years, highlighted by the creation of a successful Broadway musical called The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. The movie version starred Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton in the fictionalized account that boiled the story down to a basic theme still used in its marketing pitch: “Texas madam Miss Mona and her sheriff boyfriend try to save her chicken ranch from a TV muckraker.”

But lost amid the romanticized singing and the dancing and the nostalgic pining of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas lies an authentic true crime history yarn just as entertaining and as much a part of the Lone Star State’s many fabled legends. In I, the People, veteran Houston journalist and author Gary Taylor recreates the real story behind the closing of the Chicken Ranch and explains the forces that unleashed TV icon Marvin Zindler upon the national scene.

Gary Taylor is a veteran award-winning journalist who has covered crime, courts and legal affairs for newspapers and magazines since 1969. His 2008 true crime memoir, Luggage by Kroger—the story of a true-life fatal attraction—won five national book awards. He lives in Houston, Texas.

I am a veteran journalist and author of the award-winning true crime memoir, Luggage By Kroger. During a forty-year career as a newspaper and magazine journalist, I have covered crime, courts and legal affairs for multiple publications, including The Houston Post, The National Law Journal and Time Magazine. I began my career after graduation from the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, where I won the Walter Williams Award as the outstanding writer in the class of 1969. As a newspaper reporter, I was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize on a series of stories that freed an aging convict from prison and I won the Texas UPI Enterprise reporting award for stories exposing police corruption. As a freelance journalist from 1980-1997, I expanded my expertise to business writing, sports and larger general interest stories. Since 1997 I have specialized in business reporting as a staffer for trade publications covering the chemical and oil industries.

In 2008 I finally had the time to write a true crime memoir about the dramatic events that created a life-defining moment while working as the criminal courts reporter for The Houston Post in 1979. The result has been my award-winning book, Luggage By Kroger. It has been honored with a 2009 Silver Medal for true crime books by the IPPYs, a 2008 Bronze Medal for true crime from ForeWord Magazine and was 2009 Runner-Up in the true crime division of the National Indie Excellence Awards. It also was named a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's 2009 Book-of-the-Year Award.